A major environmental problem centers around the disposal of various waste materials. These include radioactive wastes from nuclear fission processes, and particularly low level wastes such as those obtained from the aqueous evaporators in a nuclear power plant, used ion-exchange resins and filter materials such as clays and charcoal. These wastes may be in the form of finely divided, dry solids or aqueous solutions, dispersions or slurries. Other problem wastes are those obtained as by-products from various chemical operations, such as electroplating solutions, by-products from insecticide manufacturing plants, and the like.
One method of disposing of these wastes is to incorporate them in materials such as cement or urea formaldehyde resins, solidifying the mixture and burying the blocks thus made in approved burial sites. Some of the shortcomings of this particular process are described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,077,901. This same patent describes one solution which has proven to be quite satisfactory, namely, the encapsulation of these waste materials in vinyl ester resins or in unsaturated polyester resins or in mixtures of these two types of resins. British Pat. No. 1,418,277 also describes incorporating solid radioactive wastes in a resin copolymerized with a monomer to form a solid block.
The problem of waste disposal has intensified due to the rising costs of the incorporating materials, extreme difficulty in obtaining burial space, and the criticality of effecting uniform encapsulation of radioactive waste materials so as to avoid hot spots which lead to increased transportation and burial costs of such encapsulated wastes.